They then feed these bags to seven separate carts, which tips them into 120 individual chutes for people to collect.

These people are known as baggage handlers, or handlers for short.

The carts, also known as vertical sortation units (VSU), are programmed by a computer system which knows where each piece of luggage needs to be loaded based on the tag.

The unique number and barcode are what airlines use to track your luggage and where it is in the system.

The luggage that isn't sorted by the carts (generally a load that is fragile) travels via a conveyer belt to separate room.

All of the luggage is then deposited by the chutes into a giant trolley, to be driven by the handler to the aircraft.

The arrivals have six feeder belts for international flights and one for domestic arrivals - where luggage would be unloaded by handlers one flight at a time.

Handlers have to first request a carousel from the airport and then press a button to transfer the luggage through to waiting passengers.

Contrary to what many people may think, Stansted Airport does not handle the luggage.

It's most common for airlines to contract specialist handling companies, because of the training and security checks needed for individual handlers.

For example, OmniServ is the carrier which manages Ryanair's luggage at Stansted, after the budget airline ditched former carrier Swissport in October.

You're probably wondering how long it takes. Well, the average time of transferring luggage from the terminals to the aircraft is 45 minutes.

But this isn't based on how slow or fast the teams are handling.

Christian Nicora, baggage performance manager at Stansted, said it's actually dependent on a few things.

These include the size of the aircraft, the number of handlers, and how far in advance the plane needs the bags loaded and unloaded.

Most flights want luggage to be ready to load onto the plane within 45 minutes of its having been checked in - just because, in order to make the most money, the flights have to leave as soon as possible to make way for the next flight.

It's not clear how many handlers on average assist with each plane - as that's commercially sensitive information.

Airside

Slots, slots, slots

I'll try and make this simple. You've got hundreds of flight slots at Stansted Airport per day.

Airport Coordination Limited (ACL) looks at the capacity of the airport and analyses a number of variables, such as the runway, terminals, baggage and check-in areas, security, the number of people coming through the airport etc.

Then ACL works with NATS, an air traffic control company, and makes those slots available to airlines.

Airlines then bid for those slots either in winter or in summer.

If an airline acquires a slot, it will immediately hold that slot for the next season IF its flights ran on that same schedule for 80 per cent of the previous season. Most airlines tend to do this.

It's an impartial system. An airport can't have preferences.

So if Stansted said they didn't like an airline anymore, they couldn't just force them out.

In fact, what was notable is that Stansted is essentially a landlord. It's got the building, pieces of equipment, security, managers.

But actually, out of the 12,000 odd staff working at the airport, only 1,800 are employed by Stansted.

The planes, handlers and equipment, retailers, border force, cleaners, air traffic controllers - they're all from other institutions.

The land of Ryanair

Head of airside operations, David Cran, said: "We've got one runway. This is what we call an apron - this is a big area. The bit the aircraft parks on is called is the stand.

"Quite often you get people saying they're stuck on the runway, but they haven't, it's a stand.

"All of the stands are taken up by planes overnight, including cargo - 50 per cent of those planes are Ryanair planes.

"In fact, out of our predicted 29 million passengers, 22 million odd are Ryanair."

Air traffic controllers

The air traffic controllers' job is to make sure the planes don't collide with each other.

They tend to spend their time up in the tower on the airfield.

There are around 20 controllers at Stansted, with around five working per day. Two or three controllers are usually working at any given time.

Because the job is so high-pressure, air traffic controllers can't do more than two hours without taking a 30 minute break.

Traffic controllers at Stansted only look after plane traffic around 10 miles out from the airport and everywhere on the ground - all by primarily looking out the window.

The rest of it is done by radar, a big network of which is piped down to Swanwick in Hampshire, where there is a large team of controllers managing airspace.

Each route the planes are designated to are finalised by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) through consultations, because of noise pollution etc. You can't just fly anywhere.

So if sometimes you're thinking, why don't they just take another route if one is proving difficult because of weather conditions, for example? There's your answer. Things will take time and coordination.

Every plane that operates out of the airport follows a set route or a corridor in the sky.

Only one plane can land or lift off at a time, and each aircraft has a space of around four miles.

This is because of the vortex turbulence that forms behind an aircraft as it passes.

Security

Staff are in the rota for either early shifts, late shifts, part-time rosters, night rosters - and security guards work shifts of four hours, six hours, eight hours or 10 hours.

The variance is because, quite simply, it's an airport with flights coming through 24/7.

Managers look at resource plans to make sure the airport has the right number of lanes open, depending on the number of passengers coming through for the day.

The busiest period for the staff is called 'first wave', which is between 4am to 7am - where you would get more than 13,000 people travelling in and out the airport.

In the morning, around 220 security staff would be operating 22 lanes, with 22 team leaders in addition to the other staff.

One team leader and 10 security staff operate each lane. The number of lanes would differ depending on the number of passengers.

Some people in the security team have been here for years.

Anita Harrison, head of security, and Samantha Johnson, head of security compliance

Anita Harrison, head of security, first did work experience at the airport in 2001.

And since then, the airport says security at the airport has heightened, technology has improved, and queue times are shortening.

Around 70,000 items come through the security scanners per day, and it takes around 10 minutes for the average person to get through security.

For example, in July there were over 150,000 departing passengers more than last year - which saw 99 per cent of them queuing for less than 10 minutes, compared to just over 95 per cent in July 2017.

In the same vein, in August last year, the figure was 96.3 per cent, but this year, the figure was 99.3 per cent.

But that's if you don't sort out your liquids.

As soon as I asked Anita about challenges, a woman stopped right in front of the entrance to the queue to rummage through her bag to take out her liquids.

She put them in a giant carrier bag.

Anita hurried over and told her to go and put the liquids in the bags provided by the airport, which were behind her.

It sort of emphasised the point she was about to make.

Around 13 per cent of passengers still have non-compliant liquids in their bags, which affects people's waiting times by another five to 10 minutes.

"12 years on and people are still doing bizarre things with their liquids," she said.

"You should do a front page on the Cambridge News about it.

"Please sort out your liquids."

Which made me wonder what it was like to work as a security guard here, so I asked to meet one.

Charles Atonrah, who works in security at Stansted

Charles Atonrah, a family man with three kids, has been working at the airport for 11 years.

He loves working at Stansted because he gets to meet a variety of new people each day, and because he encounters things that he does not expect.

He said: "A lady came through the arch and she was asked to take off her jacket, and she suddenly stripped naked.

"Just imagine, she stripped naked. We were like oh no, please, put them back on. We wanted to screen her, but she wouldn't put them back on.

"You encounter things like that, and she was travelling with a husband and a son."

Customer service

The customer service team are scattered around the whole airport, and they're called airport ambassadors.

Stansted's has 60 of them, who work in teams of 14 around the airport - not all working at the same time.

Mainly, the role is to improve "passenger experience". They each deal with passenger questions, health and safety, and can guide people to their gate.

You'll see them at different points by the check-in areas, the security preparation or by the entrance.

The information desk will have minimum two people on deck, but this can rise to five or six during a disruption period.

What I gathered from head of customer services Rachael Melody, was that the team bears the brunt of a lot of frustrations from passengers that don't necessarily lie with the airport.

She said the airport receives around 500 complaints each month, which include results of a survey given to each passenger asking for their feedback - even if it's down as a little constructive criticism, it will go down in that pile.

The most common complaints, she says, are about queues and delays.

"No-one likes to queue," said Ms Melody. "The perception of queues is that when you see one, you're there for hours.

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Stansted Airport

"At times they can be warranted. Definitely there are occasions because of the scale [of the operation].

"There will be times where passengers may not have the smoothest experience. Recently we have had some cancellations, and if you are on a cancelled flight and you cannot speak to your airline, who else is there to speak to?

"We often get dual position complaints and we always have to deal with the passenger.

"We have been hit with bad weather, air traffic control restrictions, and the scale of the operation has felt the impact of that

"But when you think of the percentage of the passengers affected, it's a small amount - but that does not devalue the importance people have.

"We care about our passengers."

What next for Stansted?

Paul Willis, Stansted transformation director

Paul Willis, transformation director for Stansted, waded in on its new £600 million expansion.

Essentially, what they're doing is trying to support up to 43 million passengers by 2028.

To facilitate the number of passengers, Stansted will be separating the arrival and departures lounges.

A new 36,000 sqm new arrivals-only terminal will be built, then the original building will be turned into a departures-only terminal - which will double in size to 35,000 sqm.

At the moment Stansted has 89 check-in desks. It's only just built 12, and 18 more will be built for next summer.

This will of course mean increasing the number of flight movements per hour to around 55 in peak times.

That'll be done through increasing the number of aircraft stands.

Stansted has around 15,000 car parking spaces at the moment. Stansted will be increasing that by 9,000 with a multi-storey car park.

"More spaces and shorter walking distances to make the process and accessibility a lot better," said Mr Willis.